How do you learn japanese with visual novels?

9 comments

1. Basically. Come across a word you don’t know, grab it, and make a card out of it. Keep reading.

   Read. Grab. Read. Repeat.

   Then when you’re doing your daily flash cards, you’ll see what you saved and reinforce it.

   If you use AnimeCards, it’s the same thing, just with VNs instead of anime

2. I use yomichans built in clipboard inserter, and yomichan also has a function to directly add cards into anki with one click. So when a word I don’t know pops up, I translate it immediately, and click the green button to add it into anki. Does that make sense?

3. I look for people playing it on youtube because I find it easier to pause, check specific timestamps or review it the next day. Some youtubers or streamers even read it, which I think that helps a lot.

4. I started reading VNs pretty late, so I don’t necessarily need to rely on the textractor method (and I frankly just can’t be bothered).

   What I do is look up new words on my dictionary app, bookmark it, screenshot the individual line as well as the logs (if extra context is necessary or helpful for understanding specific usage), then make my cards. I type things out manually as well as include screenshots since using just the screenshots isn’t ideal on mobile with my eyesight. This also enforces what I learned since I have to pay attention when transcribing. Thankfully, doing things this way isn’t so time-consuming with the amount of cards I actually need to make. Then once all that is done, I leave it alone until the next morning to either let the words ruminate in my head or allow myself time to **almost** forget them before actually making them part of my reps.

5. In my opinion content, and especially text-heavy content like books or VN, doesn’t go extremely well with SRS. I know it’s popular and many people do it like that, but I consider this a huge bother to make thousands or even tens of thousands of cards, and here is several factors why I think like that. When people use content, we usually talk about at least 1 or 2 hours/day, in such amount of time beginners learn 15-30 words naturally. This number isn’t so low and more or less completely compensates amount of words people learn daily with SRS. People might say, but what about reviews? But when we use content, we literally have like 10k words/hour going through us. Even after subtraction of known words from such number, we still have a huge amount of unknown words, some of these we see for the first time, some of these we have seen before and it’s our review. Another point is that realistically what words we will use in SRS has almost zero impact on individual content unit. For example, average book is probably around 70k words, by reading 2 hours/day we can finish it in 4 days. How many words we can learn in such amount of time? 80-120? Such book would often contain ~7k unknown words, we could pretty much pick any words and it would have around the same result. I’m pretty sure that it’s even the opposite, if you don’t intervene what words to memorize, you will naturally memorize words that ate more common in such book/genre, and it would benefit more.

   I usually split it like this. Don’t have enough time for content? Use SRS. There is no doubt in that SRS is much more time efficient. You become more advanced and don’t have so many unknown words anymore? It’s time to think about quality again. Sometimes we can simply use more content, but at some points it will become unreasonable and we need to do something else, for example, to be more selective with content, to focus more on memorization, or to use SRS. SRS is pretty much the only way to learn rare/advanced words in a short amount of time. When some word appears only once in 1-2 years in a natural way, it won’t be really soon when you can memorize it without artificially making it appear more often. Another point of SRS is when we need to know specific words, like if you want to pass JLPT, it might take you in up to 2-3 times longer without SRS simply because you will learn a huge amount of words that don’t appear in such tests. You don’t expect to see elves, swords or something like that there, right?

6. I look up unknown words on Takoboto on my phone and after the session send my search history to anki.

7. How’s your grammar so far?

8. The man, the myth, the legend: https://www.unddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/10j2et2/passing_jlpt_n1_with_the_power_of_nukige_my_study/

9. Reading is a great way to learn a language. I don’t use anki as the words naturally repeat themselves throughout the book.